Welcome to Surfing Political Waves, a short series podcast hosted by the Pepperdine School
of Public Policy.
This is Dan Schnurr.
And I'm Joel Fox.
And we're bringing you California election insight and analysis as the country ramps
up to one of the most historic presidential races in memory, as well as other fascinating
campaigns up and down the ballot.
Welcome to Surfing Political Waves at Pepperdine University.
I'm Joel Fox.
And my special guest today is Mike Madrid, nationally recognized expert on Latino voting
trends.
He's a partner in a public affairs firm, Grassroots Lab, and former political director for the
California Republican Party.
And most importantly, he is the author of a recently published book called The Latino
Century.
And he's being quoted all over the country and I might add all over the world on Latinos
effect on this coming election.
The subtitle of his book, The Latino Century, is How America's Largest Minority is Transforming
Democracy.
So let's start there, Mike.
Is this large Latino population going to decide this presidential election?
Great to be with you, Joel, as always.
I've known you for a long time and appreciate the conversations that we have.
You know, I've been asked that question for the better part of 30 years, been involved
in presidential campaigns for many decades now.
And my answer has always been no.
2024 is different.
2024, I'm saying yes, I think it will be the determinative vote.
Not only because it's such a close election, but because Latinos will be the margin of
victory in every single battleground state will be surpassed in many cases considerably
by Latino voters in every single state, whether we're talking about North Carolina or Wisconsin,
which are kind of newer states that we wouldn't imagine, or Arizona and Nevada, which have
much larger Latino populations.
The way this vote breaks, I think, is going to be determinative this year.
And again, I haven't I've never said that throughout the course of my career.
Well, how are the campaigns trying to reach the Latino voters?
And how successful have they been in doing that?
That's a good question also.
And it's not just that they're trying to reach Latino voters.
It's they're they're really reaching to different segments of the Latino vote.
And I think it's really I think most illustrative or better best illustrated by the fact that
they're both have named the very outreach operations in both their campaigns differently
with Kamala Harris.
It's Latinos going Biden, which is a Spanish language, you know, Latinos for Biden.
I'm sorry, with Biden, it began there and then it became Latinos going Harris.
They kept the same Spanish vernacular when the emphasis really and Democratic Party politics
is focused almost exclusively on Spanish speaking kind of the recently migrated sort of this
cultural stereotype of who Latinos are.
The Trump campaign, however, kind of makes an adjustment, very unique one.
They add the word Americans after Latinos from their 2020 campaign, Latinos for Trump,
and it becomes Latinos, Latino Americans for Trump.
And the reason why is they're speaking largely to this fast, fast growing third and fourth
generation Latino voter.
It's the fastest growing segment of the Latino vote.
It also happens to be the most Republican leaning group, this under 30 recently registered
U.S. born, often non-college educated blue collar worker is moving more Republican compared
to all other voter groups that meet the same basic demographic criteria.
They're moving Republican at a pretty fast rate.
And both campaigns, again, are speaking to these these kind of polar opposite groups
generationally in the Latino electorate.
And that, I think, is the most fascinating development that I've seen in decades of doing
this work and working with presidential campaigns is it's not just that they're speaking kind
of with this broad umbrella of who Latinos are with sort of a racial and ethnic lens.
While Democrats continue to do that, Republicans have made an adjustment to this newer, younger,
more assimilated, fast growing segment of the Latino population.
Well, you argued in your book that generally Latinos do not want to be viewed as an aggrieved
segment of society.
They want to assimilate and be part of society.
And could you could you speak to that and into what how you are envisioning this change
of view, not from the Latinos, but from many of the politicians on both sides of the aisle
and how they view the Latinos and the truth of what Latinos want?
Well, there's a lot of a lot of questions packed in there.
Yeah, let me say this.
We are we are seeing in many ways a very typical or traditional assimilative tendencies with
Latino voters.
But the main the main one is that Latino voters are losing their racial and ethnic anchor
as is very typical by the third generation.
They overwhelmingly identify as quote unquote typically American.
They their Latino identity or their country of origin identity is beginning to take a
back seat.
They still they still would suggest that they're Latinos or Hispanics and they have an appreciation
of sensitivity for their culture.
But they're they're overwhelmingly prioritized being an American.
And this is this is something that again is is not unique in American history.
But the size and scope of it is.
And I think that while we are seeing Latinos sort of assimilate into the dominant mainstream
American culture, I also argue in the book, we're witnessing the dominant mainstream culture
assimilating into Latino identity as fast or faster than the reverse.
So we're really seeing something that is not a typical melting pot, a similar pattern that
we've seen in the past.
In fact, I think it's quite different.
You know, Bad Bunny, for example, is the top artist, song artist in America.
All of his songs are in Spanish.
It's not just Latinos that are buying those albums.
Overwhelmingly, it's white English speakers.
We can go on and on with with food and culture and entertainment is modern American culture
is changing rapidly and it's becoming more Latino as much as Latinos are becoming more
modern American or typically American.
So we're witnessing a real fusion.
We're not seeing the traditional typical assimilative pattern.
And that's confounding both parties because both parties traditionally have viewed nonwhite
voters as a 70 percent plus Democratic base vote.
They speak to nonwhite voters, both parties overwhelmingly through a racial and ethnic
lens.
The Democrats more than the Republicans leave and lean into, I would argue, the more the
grievance politics under racial identity for nonwhites, I would also argue Republicans
lead into white grievance.
So both parties lean into grievance.
But the Latinos increasingly as the moderate voters in both parties are kind of rejecting
that type of politics.
And so this shift that we're seeing of Latinos to the right is really more emblematic of
a growing populist sentiment.
They're leaving both parties.
We have the weakest party anchor of any of the major ethnic groups in the country.
Of course, Latinos surpassed black Americans as the largest ethnic group in 2020 voting
group.
It's the largest now.
And grievance politics doesn't work well with Latinos.
This is an upwardly mobile aspirational working class voting group.
And the politics of racial identity on both sides aren't working.
You wrote that in your book, the Latinos are to the right of most Democrats and to the
left of most Republicans.
And they're the fastest growing segment of the electorate.
So the potential for Latinos to moderate both parties is very high.
Do you see that happening?
Is it happening now?
It's happening with voters for sure.
And a lot of Democrats will say, oh, you're moving to the right.
So that makes you, why are you leading into this kind of white supremacy, nationalist
extremism?
And Republicans, for their part, will say, why are you listening to the old get off the
plantation rhetoric they used to use with African-Americans?
Both of them are somewhat racially offensive.
But the reason why Latinos are moderates is because we're overwhelmingly focused on economic
priorities.
We're overwhelmingly focused.
We're a working class community.
And frankly, it's white Americans broadly that have sort of the luxury or the benefit
of focusing on cultural issues.
Both of the Republican and Democratic Party leadership, despite Kamala Harris's background,
the political consulting class is over 90% white on both sides.
They focus primarily on the cultural issues that animate their voter base.
So on the American right, it's immigration.
It's gender-based bathrooms.
You know, the rejection of wokeism, where woke goes to die, speaking really kind of
to their own base.
Nobody else really understands why they're so hopped up about it.
Like, what are Republicans talking about?
But that's the way they speak to themselves.
And it works because they're animated by cultural change.
They don't feel comfortable with where America is heading culturally, racially, ethnically,
or I would argue with what the changes are happening with the conservative social structure
of the traditional family.
The Democrats, for their part, are basically—their conundrum is they don't recognize that they're
not the party of the working class anymore.
Their own base is animated by reproductive rights, abortion rights, gun control, marijuana
legalization, climate change.
Neither of these parties are really speaking from a real comprehensive policy perspective
about working class issues.
And so in default, when you have the fastest-growing segment of the working class as Latinos, they're
going to vote with the party that's more populist and with the party that best represents, from
their perspective, working class culture, which is increasingly Republican.
But then you hear people complain that the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump,
says, I want to deport a lot of people.
And the question is to Latinos often, why would you support Mr. Trump if his main plank
is deportation of people who have come over the border illegally?
How do you respond to that?
Well, again, the question presupposes that Latinos all identify with the undocumented
immigrant personally.
And obviously, that's not true of virtually any voting Latinos.
Only about 20% of voting Latinos are immigrants themselves.
By definition, undocumented immigrants are not voting, despite what you might hear in
your right-wing media.
That's just quantifiably false and not true.
So by definition, there's no correlation there.
And I think that's one of the things that the Democrats really don't get is a lot of
Latino polling has been done this cycle.
I've been obviously looking at it for 30 years.
The Latino voting citizen doesn't have that direct personal experience, by and large,
with the undocumented experience.
And so when they hear Democrats sort of defending that, they immediately from the get become
unrelatable.
And that's a significant problem for the Democratic Party because it's really doubled down on
what I think can accurately be described as a very progressive open border essential policy.
We have no border security framework or policy specifics.
The attacks of being called open border land, they stick.
And Latinos themselves are increasingly shifting to a stronger border security policy.
They want to see border security.
It doesn't mean it's racist.
There's certainly a racist way to do it.
And that I think that is embodied in Donald Trump and a lot of the Republican Party today.
And I think that's why there's an opening for Kamala Harris.
In fact, I think her very significant shift to the right on these issues towards a very
conservative Republican position on immigration is one of the reasons why she closed the gap
as much as she had moved away from where Biden's really bad numbers were.
The reasons why she brought it down to about 2020 levels is because of the pivot on immigration.
So the whole idea of immigration becomes this overwhelming issue for a group of voters that
don't prioritize the issue.
They never have.
And as we become more third and generation voter group, we are prioritizing it even less,
except for when we want more border security and mitigate the immigration reform and pathway
to citizenship and DACA protections.
And that doesn't mean we don't want those.
We do want those as well as a community, but they're not a priority.
They never have been.
I heard you give some very interesting figures about Los Angeles County voters who are foreign
born.
And I think that would enrich our discussion.
Could you go over that again, please?
Yeah, the premise of my book is that we're witnessing a generational transformation in
Latino voters.
And it's important to understand that those that are recently migrated that do become
naturalized and sit and register to vote have an extremely different political outlook than
their sons and daughters and a tectonic difference between their sons and granddaughters.
And the fastest growing group in the country is this third generation.
There's even now a discernible fourth generation cohort that's big enough for us to study.
That wasn't the case when I first started looking at Latino voters in the 90s.
But Los Angeles County, which is by far the largest Latino county in all of the country
and is really the primary first stopping point for most Mexican and Central American immigrants
has been reflective of that change so much so that in 2002, about 22 years ago, over
half of the new Latino registrants in LA County, 54% were foreign born.
Over half of new Latino registrants in 2002 in Los Angeles County were foreign born.
Many years later, by 2022, that number had dropped to about 8%, like just completely
fallen off a cliff.
Fascinating numbers.
They really are.
It's fascinating numbers and it shows just how dramatic within one generation this vote
is changing.
It's just completely transforming.
And the Latino voter of what we have come to understand and characterize and stereotype
over the last 30 years is going to be wholly different, completely and entirely different
than the Latino vote of the next 30 years.
So let's go back to this election right now.
I'm curious to know your feelings about the impact of the Madison Square Garden event
where Latinos and particularly Puerto Ricans were abused by some of the speakers.
Do you think that's going to have an impact on this current campaign?
I do.
I think it will have an impact.
In fact, I think it really hurts Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
I'll explain why in just a second.
But the main reason why a lot of people have asked, been talking with reporters over the
past 48 hours about this, all saying, why?
What's different about this offensive comment compared to the hundreds of other offensive
comments that he's made?
And the answer really kind of lies in the question, which is it wasn't Donald Trump
that was saying it.
This is the first time that we are witnessing kind of this parade of terribles around him
using horribly disgusting, racist, vile, vulgar arguments and jokes, quote unquote, jokes,
trying to hide the racism with humor.
And America's sensibilities were shocked by it.
To defend it at this point, you're not just defending Trump where we've kind of rolled
our eyes at it and say, OK, the old man's crazy.
He's just saying old man stuff like at Thanksgiving dinner, just ignore it and he'll move on.
If Donald Trump had said these things, we would be moving on.
He gets a pass now because we're just so immune to the fact that Donald Trump is just that
guy.
But it wasn't Donald Trump.
It was the people that he surrounds himself with.
And that's what's fundamentally different is just as Americans and Latinos specifically
are beginning to tune into this election, they're hearing from the people around him
comfortable with tossing around some of the vulgarity and vile language of not just offending
Puerto Ricans with it being an island of garbage, but a black Americans carving watermelons
for Halloween.
Like enough, like enough.
We're done with this.
And I think the most immediate impacts happen in the one battleground state where Puerto
Ricans are the largest ethnic plurality.
And that is in Pennsylvania, a state that is kind of neck and neck at the moment.
And I think this offends the sensibilities, obviously, of the Puerto Rican diaspora, where
if he loses just a couple of three points of those voters to Kamala Harris, it has a
tectonic impact.
But moreover, Pennsylvania is the state that had the largest number of Republican defections
to Biden away from Trump of all the battleground states in 2020.
This is exactly the type of rhetoric of why they're leaving.
College educated people don't have any desire to be in a party that looks like the Confederacy
and defends the Confederacy that plays footsie with white supremacists.
And it's really more than playing footsie.
It's now just openly embracing and platforming these voices.
And again, the reason why I think this hits different is because you can't just dismiss
this as Donald Trump being Donald Trump.
We shouldn't be doing that as a country anyway, but you can't do it because it wasn't him.
It was the people that he chose to elevate.
And it wasn't just one.
It was many of them.
And the anti-Semitism, the anti-black comment, the anti-immigrant comments, the anti-Puerto
ican comments, all combined show just this menagerie of terribles.
That's why I think it is going to affect the outcome of the race.
And what about Latino voters in heavy Latino states?
They're also considered swing states.
I'm thinking of Nevada and Arizona primarily, but you may have comments on some of the other
swing states.
Well, all of them, as I mentioned in kind of an intro here, every one of them has a
Latino population that will be bigger, in many cases, much bigger than the margin of
victory.
Arizona, of course, which is the largest, also has a more multigenerational Latino experience.
You've got immigrants, you've got their children, you've got their grandchildren, all registered
and will be voting this year.
That's very unique and different from a Nevada, for example, which is predominantly foreign-born
or more foreign-born, not predominantly, but more foreign-born.
Overwhelmingly blue collar union members, the culinary union is the famous Harry Reid
machine in Clark County.
Basically the workforce that makes the Las Vegas strip work is over half Latino and it
is a pro-labor constituency.
But it is also going to really love Donald Trump's tax on tips argument and the affordability
issues that he's been laying out.
Arizona and Nevada, incidentally, Arizona, of course, is a border state.
Nevada is less so.
But the competition with the undocumented for labor and unskilled labor and just basic
border security in Arizona are much more predominant issues with Latinos there than they are, for
example, in Pennsylvania, where you've got Puerto Ricans who are US citizens by birth.
Wisconsin has a larger Latino voting population than Black Americans now, radically changing.
North Carolina will have about 283,000 Latino voters, which is about one or 2% of the population.
That state will come down to an election by less than 1%.
Latinos aren't being polled.
So you've got a real sleeper group in North Carolina where Latinos could be the determinative
in North Carolina going one way or the other.
Very interesting.
Let's bring it back to our home state of California.
Yeah.
You, as I mentioned in the introduction, were the California Republican Party political
director.
California clearly was affected by the campaign of Proposition 187 in 1994.
I once talked to the campaign manager of the team that was trying to defeat 187 and said
he thought it was going down to defeat until the demonstrations with many Mexican flags
in downtown Los Angeles.
And then it passed.
But my question is this, in regard to the big discussion about immigration today, reflecting
back to what happened here in California, obviously the GOP shrunk in California right
after that.
But given the migration issue that's now taken the center stage, is there redemption for
the California Republican Party with the Latinos and specifically Governor Wilson, who was
tied to that campaign?
Or is it two different eras in different political environments?
How do you put all that together?
What happened then?
What's happening now?
Yeah, that's a great question.
Yeah, first, the comment about Proposition 187 going down to defeat because Mexicans
were waving flags, that's absurd.
You don't move 20 points.
You never have.
That's not what happened.
If that did or didn't happen, voters were going to overwhelmingly break the way that
they were going to break.
The polling always showed it in that position.
That's why Pete Wilson leaned into the issue.
He leaned into it because he was down 27 points against Kathleen Brown in February of that
year.
He wins by 17 points.
It's not because it was iffy.
It was overwhelmingly being supported by Californians.
So that was just a consultant defending his position, probably.
Yeah, and his soul, I think, probably.
A lot of people just trying to solve their soul.
The question of redemption is a good one because it presupposes the redemption, I think, is
the right word.
Redemption, I think, in many ways is predicated on the idea that you either have learned your
lesson or have sought forgiven or that you were right all along.
I don't know that either of those actually fit the narrative correctly.
The California Republican Party has very, very significant problems with Latino voters.
Very significant.
It's been 30 years.
It's hard not to say that they were wrong, quantifiably wrong by not only doing this
in 1994 but continuing it for another 20 years.
What I do think is fascinating is by the time the Republican Party will get back into contention,
if it ever does, it will be when all of those supporters and activists and consultants are
dead.
So I don't know that redemption is the right word.
I think that changing times would probably be a better reflection of what that meant.
I think that the Republican Party, it wasn't just one issue.
It was 20 years of leaning into anti-immigrant, pro-white supremacist thinking that I think
leaves the Republican Party in California where it's at today deservedly so.
There were voices at the time, of course, to say, don't go down this path.
You were one of them.
I know another one, friend of both of ours, I believe, Stu Spencer, who was Ronald Reagan's
campaign manager, who tirelessly tried to talk the Republican Party into embracing the
rising Latino vote and not successfully.
And other people that I admire greatly, Jack Kemp among them warned and said, this is coming.
And the thing about Stu Spencer and Jack Kemp, they are people that care deeply, obviously
about the Republican Party as it was, but more importantly, they care about human beings
and humanity.
And they saw the Republican Party at one time as a vehicle for that.
They saw, I think, the ugliness arising from the shadows.
That wasn't just 187.
When they said when they knew correctly was just the beginning of what was becoming sort
of opening Pandora's box.
And like I said, there was 20 years of this stuff that went on.
For every year, for two decades, there was another Republican legislator introducing
more anti-immigrant legislation.
And it's cost them.
It's cost them dearly, as it probably should have.
But like I said, if you believe that one political party is more virtuous than the other simply
by the nature of its existence, you're probably part of the problem.
And it's one of the things that I admire most about Jack Kemp and Stu Spencer, both mentors,
both great heroes of mine, was that they stood up against popular opinion because they knew
that what was going on was not right.
And it's hard to do sometimes when your name, your reputation, your income, your business
is on the line.
It's very, very rare to see people of courage stand up in these modern times, especially
against a political machine.
And they both did it.
And I'm very deeply proud of them for doing it.
I expect you felt a little bit of that pressure over the last few years yourself.
Oh, my involvement's come at great cost.
I don't regret it.
I'm more proud of myself because we've all been at those moments in time as Americans
in deciding what we would have done during the rise of authoritarianism in 1930s Germany.
It's that question you're asked in fifth grade.
And now we all know.
We all know.
And I know for certain what I would have done then.
I know what I have done now is it cost me a big part of my business.
It cost me a lot of quote unquote friends.
But the difference between good and bad at this moment in this dark, dark chapter in
American history is very clear.
And I am very proud that my children and my children's children will know where I stood.
That's a strong note to end on.
But I would like to give you at least the opportunity.
If you have any final comments or optimistic comments you'd like to add about the direction
we're headed, I'd love to hear them.
Well the book, The Latino Century, is ultimately a very optimistic book.
And I think that was as we look and we hear discussions on both sides of the aisle about
what is wrong with democracy and the failings of democracy and people are continually looking
for different reforms.
You know, is it ranked choice voting?
Is it eliminating the electoral college?
Is it, you know, primary reform?
Is it campaign, dark money campaign reform?
None of these reforms work.
None of the Constitution doesn't work unless it is supported by people that still believe
in it.
And so much of what is happening at this moment is a failure of the American people to continue
the extension of confidence and trust in our Constitution, in our American norms, and the
idea of America itself.
People over the age of 60 have the most negative perceptions of America and her future of any
modern generation ever polled with modern polling techniques.
That's a damning statement from a generation that has probably been the beneficiary of
the greatest wealth, privilege, and largesse that this country has ever produced.
Meanwhile, this group under 30, much poorer, much more recently migrated, much more Latino,
with far less reasons to believe in America, score very, very high in the idea of the promise
of America and the future and what tomorrow brings.
And that's our great hope.
Because no matter what reforms, no matter what public policies we implement, we can
always change those.
You can fix bad policy.
What you can't fix is a belief in who you are as a people.
At a certain point, it's just going to have to be demographic change.
And the reason why I am so hopeful is every day we become more pure to our original commitments,
to the idea that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.
The wide swath of Americans who believe that we can go back to a time where we can reject
that and stop us from being anything other than a white Christian nation.
We are becoming less so.
And I think that's truer to the American creed, the American idea is practicing our faith
the way that we see it, coming from the different beautiful ethnic cultures that we are from
and still be great guardians of the American idea, the American experiment.
And we're witnessing that happening every day.
Thank you for that summary, Mike.
And thank you for joining us.
Surfing the political waves here at Pepperdine.
Mike Madrid, author of the Latino Century.
Thanks again.
Joel, thanks for your friendship and for having me on.
Appreciate you.
Thank you.
Thanks for joining us for this conversation on Surfing Political Waves.
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